


wheels take me (i can't stay)

by idekman



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet, F/M, also beachtrip au, also roadtrip au, coffee shop AU, matt is briefly mentioned, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 00:04:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10546632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idekman/pseuds/idekman
Summary: It’s quiet and still the day she sets off for Maine.She heads off early, Ben’s car and his old tapes crackling out of the speakers. Shining Star comes on and she ejects the tape so fast she almost goes headlong into the back of another car on the freeway.--Karen goes on holiday. A familiar face makes an appearance.





	

 It’s quiet and still the day she sets off for Maine.

She heads off early, Ben’s car and his old tapes crackling out of the speakers ( _Shining Star_ comes on and she ejects the tape so fast she almost goes headlong into the back of another car on the freeway) and when the air con busts halfway there she doesn’t mind, just winds down the window and drives with one hand on the wheel, the other glancing against the breeze. Her skin burns a touch as the sun falls across her face, her nose and the top of her cheekbones flushed pink. She can’t bring herself to mind.

She catches a few hours in a car park rather than sleep in a motel. It feel safer, somehow, to sleep in the locked interior of a car she inherited, wearing a sweater she stole from Foggy, finger’s curled around a dead man’s gun.

_(She is ephemeral, lacking permanence, wrapping herself around stolen and borrowed things.)_

Dawn wakes her, the car park turned milky and grey, and she watches the sunrise with a shitty two-dollar cup of coffee, skin turning warm as the sky blooms pink and orange and golden.

Maine is just as she remembered.

 

Ellison had insisted she take a holiday.

She’d woken up to an email telling her not to come in for two weeks and a receipt for a B&B up in New Hampshire. _Consider it your Christmas bonus_ , Ellison had told her when she’d rung, confused and miserable. He’d tried to sound chirpy, at first, as if this was a normal thing, until his voice had lowered, until he’d told her _you’re exhausted, Page. You need a break._ She’d tried to come in the next day. Security hadn’t let her up.

She’d been ready to sulk, ready to sit in her apartment for two weeks sat hunched over her laptop, come back to Ellison with a dozen more threads to chase – and then her electricity had gone. Water, too. _Building-wide problem, babe,_ her landlord had told her, somehow missing the cringe that ran through her as he ineffectually twiddled with her taps. _Could take a few weeks to fix._

Her landlord was barely out of the door when she’d thrown some shit in a travel bag and left.

 

She sings along to the radio, loudly and off-key, as she thunders down the highway, both windows rolled right down. Every now and then she’ll have to slow with the traffic and feel other drivers side-eying her. She wonders what they see. Young girl in a ratty hoodie and shorts, tapping out a drum beat on her steering wheel, churning through radio channels to find something she likes. She must look like some college kid heading out on holiday.

Traffic is thick and she’s at a stand-still. Most of the cars around her have turned off the engine, so for a moment she lets her eyes flicker shut. Pretends just that – she’s off on some girls holiday, newly minted ID, head clear, chest light and free and –

Someone behind her leans on their horn. She puts her foot down.

 

The B&B is nice. Nicer than anything she could afford, in some tiny little town by the coast, not far from Portland. She can see the ocean from her room and for a moment her breath gets caught up in her chest. The glass is cool against her finger tips and when she throws open her window she can taste the salt in the air.

(If she shuts her eyes and listens to the seagulls screeching across the harbour she can almost pretend she’s back, by the seaside on holiday as a kid, sand gritted in her clothes beneath her fingernails and –)

 

She heads out for dinner that evening, puts on a sundress and pushes out into dusk, stops at the first place serving local seafood she can find.

She brought a book with her to read as she eats, a slim volume of poetry she’s been meaning to get into, but the waiter gets chatting with her. He’s young, maybe even younger than her, a European accent she can’t quite place, and when she manages to make him laugh the sound is clear and sweet. She lies, tells him she’s stopping by for a few days before she moving on to visit her parents upstate, tells him her name’s Alison, demurs when he asks for her phone number with the bill and scribbles a fake number onto the scrap of paper he slides over to her.

It’s a different lie to the one she told the lady at the B&B place as she’d been shown to her room, or the one she told the sweet couple she’d stopped to ask for directions, leaning out of her car with a gangly arm brushing the hot metal of her car door. But the lying feels good. Like sloughing off a layer of dead skin.

She has a glass of wine alone in her room – and then another one, and another, and she falls asleep listening to a late night talk show on the radio. She dreams of the sea, of drowning in it – so when she wakes just before dawn again, eyes sticky with sleep, skin sticky with sweat, exhausted and electrified all at once, she changes into her swimsuit and takes her towel, and goes for a swim.

The sea is still and she swims as far out as feels safe, tries not to think about the cavernous space below her, lets seaweed brush up against her shins. She stands on the shoreline for a little while and feels wet sand sink between her toes and for a second, a moment of salt on her skin and hair snaking water down her back, she’s ten again.

 

When she turns, the beach is already beginning to fill with people – it’s a Saturday and the sky is cloudless, and she gets the feeling there are a lot of tourists here, just like her, making a weekend of it – and she hurries back to her towel. A couple of kids are investigating the rock pools, early risers staking out their section of the beach, and she pulls on a dress – some stripy thing she’d never wear back in New York, feels her stomach rumble and scouts up and down the beach. There’s a little beach-side hut, some brawny guy carrying out tables, wiping them down as they open up. She wonders if she can harangue him into selling her something this early – she’s suddenly _starving_ , and –

The guy turns.

She’s been hit with a sledgehammer, right in the chest. Breath sucks in with the force of it. Feels the shock reverberate through her rib cage, feels her hands come up to her stomach, fingers linking together.

 

She sits in the B&B room. Runs the soft pad of her thumb over her car keys, presses down hard enough on the sharp edge of metal that her skin turns white, then red when she pulls away.

She puts the car keys down on the dresser. She rubs sunscreen into her shoulders, where they’re starting to go pink, on the bridge of her nose. Goes to the window and stares down at the sea. Unpacks her suitcase for the second time in twenty-four hours, watches the tremor in her fingers and waits as the panic attack crackles through her and, eventually, passes.

 

He’s still there when she goes back. Of course he is. For a little while, she’d been able to convince herself that he was a mirage, that she’d been making him up in her head.

But of course she wasn’t.

She stops just a few steps away. She thinks he must know she’s there because his shoulders go a little tense and for a moment he pauses – but then he forges on, keeps scrubbing away at the table tops.

‘I don’t want any trouble, ma’am.’

His voice is gravelly but impossibly gentle and she thinks, screams in her head, _why here? Why now?_

He turns. She thinks her face must be white because he blanches a little when he sees her. He looks good. Better than she’d expected. She realises, abruptly, that she’s never seen him without a face littered in bruises and cuts. His skin is tan, there are dark circles under his eyes and he’s a little thinner than he used to be but he looks –

He looks good.

His gaze flitters – from the beach full of people, to the cloth in his hands, to her. Goes to step forward then seems to think better of it, an aborted lurch. Finally;

‘What are you doing here?’

Somehow, childishly, she thinks she should be asking him that.

‘My editor –’ she blurts out, first thing she thinks of and it’s stupid, so very stupid, because Frank’s already darting forward, her arm in his grip, drawing her close as he growls out;

‘Who else knows I’m here?’

Reasonably, she knows with how tight he’s holding her arm, it should hurt. Adrenaline floods her system and she blinks, stares up at him.

‘No – no one, Frank, I swear – my editor sent me here on a holiday –’ and she’s cut off again, Frank huffing out a bitter sound, coiled up and angry and jerking out of his chest. She watches his face as his jaw clenches, watches him make half a dozen plans to leave in the space of a breath, and she carries on, words tripping over themselves; ‘he thinks you’re dead, Frank, everyone does – I promise you, Frank, I didn’t – it’s just a coincidence –’ he’s trembling all over and he won’t look at her so she shifts, as far as she can, waits until he meets her eye. ‘Frank,’ she murmurs, and his name sounds entirely odd coming from her, rushed out in a breath, and she forces herself to steady, to meet his gaze and not look away as she tells him, ‘I _swear._ ’

He’s trying to read the truth from her face. She’s not sure what he sees there but he lets her go, sees the marks of his fingers fading away from his skin and goes all drawn and small for a moment.

‘It’s okay,’ she says, on instinct. ‘Didn’t hurt.’ He’s still stood close, gaze drawn over her shoulder again, watching the beach behind her. He takes a step back, finally, allows some distance between them.

‘Why don’t I sit down,’ she tells him, slowly, every exhale a shake, every word hand-picked to avoid spooking him even as she fights to catch her breath, ‘and you can start from the beginning.’

 

Frank’s making coffee.

She’d expected him to sit down with her but instead he had pulls out a chair for her close to the little beach hut that he’s retreated into. He pulls out a coffee mug and she expects him not to speak as he switches on the espresso machine, waits for the milk to heat up – but he starts, voice crackling and slow;

‘I came here about a month after – after everything.’ She nods – realises he’s not looking at her, is staring down at coffee mug and stops. ‘New York was –’ he breaks off and here he does look at her, glances through the doorway and catches her watching him, goes back to adding powder to the drink he’s making. ‘It was getting hard, pretending to be dead in a place where my face was plastered across every paper in town.’

His shoulders are stiff and his jaw is clenched. _Lie_ , she realises.

He doesn’t speak again until he emerges.

He looks very clean. Which sounds absurd – but he’s dressed in a white t-shirt, dark jeans, a little stubble growing across his jaw. Still with that military-grade buzz cut. But he’s – brighter, somehow.

‘I got on a bus as far as it would take me, hot wired a car and drove ‘til I ran outta gas. Ended up here. This place was hiring, and I just – stayed.’

The court case – the shootings – all of it – that was half a year ago. Frank’s been here for five months.

_Five months._

She expects him to drink the coffee but, absurdly, he slides it across the table to her and sits down himself. There’s something inherently ridiculous about Frank Castle, hunkered down on a plastic beach chair in the middle of a summer’s day in Maine. She takes a sip of her coffee to swallow the bubble of hysteria that’s rising in her throat.

Surprise goes rigid across her features.

‘This is my coffee order,’ she tells him. Voice flat. He’d even remembered the cinnamon on top. Something in her jaw tics as Frank swipes a hand under his nose, glares out across the water. ‘Frank,’ she grinds out. ‘What –’

When he turns back to her, fury rolls off him in waves. When he speaks, his voice is low and dangerous and she wishes she’d never come got in her fucking car, wishes she’d never stepped foot out of New York.

‘What right have you got, huh? What’s _with_ you? You think you’re so entitled to answers, huh – you and that fuckin’ _lawyer_ –’

And of course. She should have known.

She doesn’t speak but he sees the way her face falls and cuts himself off, all the fight going out of him as she scrubs a hand over her eyes, lets the exhaustion rush through her.

‘What did he do?’ He doesn’t speak. He has a little burn on his thumb, she spots, almost-healed, keeps on running his fingers over it. ‘Come on Frank. I’m not an idiot.’

He lets a breath quake out of him.

‘He told me to leave.’

‘Matt?’

He glances up at her then, and she sees the question curled up in his features. Corrects herself;

‘Daredevil.’

‘You know?’

She nods, slowly.

‘He told me not long after it all – after everything that happened.’ She doesn’t mention how she’d screamed at him, how utterly _stupid_ he’d made her feel, how she’d cried when she was alone back in her apartment, felt torn into tiny pieces.

(Doesn’t tell him how Frank had been right, in the diner; she had loved him, then. Not any more.)

‘How’d that work out?’

She’s aware her face is an open book, a raw nerve. Can feel the hurt tangled up in her features, catches it when Frank blinks and glances away. She almost wishes he’d keep looking. Vindictively, she wants to prove him wrong, show up everything he’d said in that fucking diner. _I don’t want someone who hurts me. Look at what it did to me._

‘So you two aren’t –’

‘No,’ she snaps, wonders why he keeps pressing this. Her coffee cup rattles when she slams it down on the table. It’s her turn to look away, to study the people on the beach, the kids still at the rock pool, a young couple splashing sea water at each other, screeching with the cold of the water. When she looks back, he’s watching her, unabashed.

‘He told me to leave ‘cause of you.’

She knocks over the cup of coffee, grits out a swear word, watches as Frank jumps up, fetches a wad of kitchen roll and carefully, patiently mops it up. Sits down and continues, as if none of it had ever happened;

‘I had heard rumours – someone was planning a hit not far from your apartment block. I was there, scoping things out – but I guess Red heard the same things I did, ‘cause he turned up. Took one look at me and told me to get out. Must’a figured I was involved somehow. Told me that I was dangerous for you, that if I knew what was good for me I would stay away. Next day I was on the bus on my way here.’

He says it all smooth and quick, not stumbling over his words, not pausing.

( _He’s ashamed,_ something tells her. _He agrees with Matt._ )

 

(Later, she dials a number she hasn’t for a very long time and leaves a voice mail. It’s short, and to the point, and she tells Matt she doesn’t want to see him again. _Not_ _lurking around my apartment, not in your shitty Daredevil get up – not at all. Stay the_ fuck _away from me._ )

 

‘You’re angry,’ he murmurs. Not a question. A statement.

‘No,’ she manages, eventually, quiet and soft. _Not with you_ , she wants to say. _With Matt. With Daredevil. With New York. With Fisk and Wesley and Schoonover and every single scumbag who tries to hurt me._ She takes a long breath, feels it swoop in and out of her lungs. _But not with you. Somehow, not with you._ ‘No, I’m not angry. Not any more’ A little more sure this time, a little stronger. He nods, clearly not believing her. Her coffee cup rattles against the saucer.

‘Why’d you come here, Karen?’ He asks, finally, over the wash of the water and the screech of seagulls. 'Really?' She had thought it would be quiet here, but somehow it’s noisier than New York, where she had learned to drown out the wail of traffic and footfall. When she speaks, her voice sounds too loud.

‘Honestly. My editor sent me on holiday. That’s all.’

Frank’s staring at her, eyes hard. Something reflexive and frustrated lines his shoulders and she finds herself instinctively leaning back as he shifts forward.

(His hand is close to hers, covered in nicks and scars. Her touch drifts.)

‘What – you think he just _happened_ to send you here?’ She blinks, a little affronted – the idea that Ellison might lie to her, manipulate her into sniff out a clue, use her to follow a hunch he’s too busy to –

‘Oh,’ she mutters, wretched. Of course. It’s what she would have done, after all, if it were a different thread she were chasing. She expects Frank to scoff, to laugh at her, bitter and cold – but when she meets his gaze he’s just watching.

‘Are you gonna tell him I’m here?’

‘No.’ It’s immediate, seems to take Frank aback. She had thought it would be obvious. ‘We’re long past that.’ And then, when he says nothing, she offers a quiet acquiescence; a little step back, a loosening of terms. ‘Aren’t we?’

An out. He doesn’t take it.

‘Yeah.’ When he laughs it’s gruff, and self-deprecating, and a little miserable, but the sound is somehow a relief.

He stands. She braces herself – for what, she’s not sure, but he just moves back into the little beach hut. She waits, watching him, unabashed now. He moves fluidly around the space and she wanders, abruptly, if he’s bored out here.

He rests a pot of ice cream by her arm. She blinks at him. He’s cracking open a tub of vanilla.

‘It’s good – they make it locally, on some farm about twenty miles west.’ When she doesn’t speak, he continues, ‘What? You don’t like fudge?’

‘No, I –’ she breaks off, perplexed. ‘Fudge is… Fine, Frank.’

He nods, seemingly pleased, although his placid expression reveals little.

‘This used to be Maria’s favourite place for – holidays, you know,’ Frank starts up, after a few moment’s silence. ‘The kids loved it too. Didn’t have much time to come up – it’s expensive round here, and I didn’t have much leave, but we’d drive up for a weekend here and there.’ He stares out at the beach. ‘Frank Junior chipped his front tooth on the rock pools over there,’ he tells her, jabbing his spoon out towards the far-side of the beach. ‘Blood _everywhere,_ Maria was freaking out – he had to have stitches on his front lip.’ He shakes his head, exponentially fond, and when he glances back down to his ice cream, blinking his way back into the presence, something in the pit of Karen’s chest breaks.

‘Will you stay here?’ She asks, clearing her throat to mask the roughness of her voice. Frank shrugs, shoulders tight.

‘If your editor’s tracked me down, someone guy who's bigger and badder will have too.’ He sniffs, squints out across the bay. ‘Might as well keep moving.’

She watches him, and watches and watches and watches, and then tells him, absurdly, entirely out of the blue;

‘Come back to New York with me.’

He watches her back. Scoffs.

‘Right –’

‘I mean it. Come back.’

A beat. She feels it physically, like a punch to the chest. Frank won’t stop staring at her, eyebrows pulled together, a permanent scowl etched across him.

‘Why?’

She clenches her jaw.

_Because I miss you. Because I haven’t slept properly since I saw those burned bodies being pulled off that boat and thought you were one of them. Because I shot James Wesley seven times in the chest and I’ve done awful things before that and I think you’re the only person who would understand._

‘Because I want you to.’

It’s the opposite of the acquiescence. It’s back against the wall, take it or leave it. _All in._

His jaw flutters and his eyes look soft and his entire face curls inwards, vulnerable and entirely new. Karen can feel her heartbeat, in the tips of her fingers, in the lines of her neck, in the thrumming of her pulse points. He meets her eye.

‘Okay.’  

 

**Author's Note:**

> y'all are just gonna ignore the fact that i forgot karen's car got totalled until i was writing the summary for this okay? okay.
> 
> aight so i posted this on my [writing tumblr](http://idekman-ao3.tumblr.com/), [tryna do that consistently as i upload fics] so if you liked it and wanted to share with your followers go ahead! or give me a follow on my [regular blog](http://judest-francis.tumblr.com/) idk whatever you do you


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